With the end of semester, quite literally looming ahead of you like a giant honing beacon you can’t hide from, it is perhaps time to look back and reflect. You might have added many accolades to your name this spring, what with having survived the mother of all cold winters and making it halfway through 2014, but I bet you couldn’t name a life-changing book you read.
It’s a crime to have this semester go by and not have read at least one book that changed your life, or at least gave you a tickle. Healthy skepticism is not only tolerated for now, but in fact encouraged because it is possible.
And it does happen, when you know you’re not simply reading letters woven together but actually absorbing the power within them. Or more likely, the brilliantly crazy but slightly pompous sounding literature columnist puts ideas into your head. I am fluent in the art of subliminal messages after all. But that’s when you pick up a book to change your life this summer.
“Hunger” by Knut Hamsun is one of the top books for my summer. From what I’ve heard and read about it—spoilers don’t bother me—it is strangely modern for being published in 1890 but relatively unknown because Hamsun became a Nazi sympathizer in his old age.
“Hunger” explores the toxic and morbidly fascinating tale of a writer who starves himself because he cannot write and the only way he can eat is by writing. The self-destructive themes and the conflicting drives for self-preservation and self-immolation found within this book will hit close to home with many of our secret—or not so secret—narcissistic tendencies.
Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” is a forgotten gem from the 1920s. While we have read about the opulence of that era through “The Great Gatsby” and many others, this book is a critique on conformity and the life of quiet desperation. “Babbitt” was a term that became synonymous with middle-class stolidity and therefore satirically explores the plight of the conformist individual.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is not a strange name to us, but we rarely speak of this brilliant man’s dark and self-destructive side. “The Crack Up” is a starkly honest account of someone stubbornly hell bent on their own annihilation. Fitzgerald lived the “Gatsby” life to some extent and this compilation of letters and essays after his death show his downward spiral to emptiness and despair he embarked upon.
His ultimate moment of glory is his fight to recover and eventually climbing out of the grave he was determined to dig for himself. My only hope is that a tale of such blatant survival of the mind might just evoke some distant source of inspiration within us, even leading us to—God forbid—come up with an awesome idea or two for the next semester.
I’ll end with famous journalist John Gunther’s memoir about his 17-year-old son dying from a brain tumor, “Death Be Not Proud.” Deeply profound and heart wrenching, this book will leave you with a better appreciation of all the misgivings and doubts in your life. Because you’ll know that having them is always better than the alternative.
It is the tale of a boy who could quite easily be changing the world right now and the poise he displays on the threshold of death. If after encountering what Johnny calls “The Unbeliever’s Prayer” within the book, you are still not prompted to do some much needed summer time soul searching, then dishonor on you and dishonor on your cow.
Have any summer reading you want to recommend to Maham? Send her an email at mhasan4@wisc.edu.
